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Lebanese Students Abroad Fear their Future Will be Lost over Dollar Crisis

Anti-government protesters break a bank security camera during a protest in Beirut. AP file photo
Anti-government protesters break a bank security camera during a protest in Beirut. AP file photo
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Lebanese Students Abroad Fear their Future Will be Lost over Dollar Crisis

Anti-government protesters break a bank security camera during a protest in Beirut. AP file photo
Anti-government protesters break a bank security camera during a protest in Beirut. AP file photo

Lebanese medical student Mohammad Sleiman traveled to Belarus to become the first doctor in his family, but he now fears his country's economic crisis is going to get him expelled.

"I've got a future and I'm working towards it," the 23-year-old said from his bedroom in the capital Minsk, a dream catcher hanging on the wall behind him.

"But if they throw me out of university, my future will be lost. And it'll be the Lebanese state's fault."

As Lebanese banks forbid depositors from transferring their own money abroad, thousands of students who went abroad to pursue studies they could not afford at home are among the hardest hit.

Students told AFP they had moved into cheaper accommodation, taken on jobs or even cut back on meals. Some had been forced to fly home to Lebanon, with no idea how to return to their studies.

Sleiman said he was so stressed about money that he could hardly concentrate in class.

Back home, his family's dollar savings have been trapped in the bank since 2019, and the 23-year-old has no idea how he will pay tuition fees when his father can barely borrow enough to send him rent.

Last month, he says his name appeared on a list with other Lebanese threatened with expulsion if they did not pay up.

Lebanon's parliament passed a law last year to help students like him, but parents say banks systematically turn them away demanding more paperwork.

In the south of Lebanon, Sleiman's father said he had been to several protests by parents demanding help from the Lebanese authorities, but to no avail.

Without access to his savings, 48-year-old Mousa Sleiman has to buy $300 for his son each month on the black market at an exorbitant exchange rate.

But his earnings from his toy and cosmetics store, in Lebanese pounds now worth 85 percent less at street value, cannot even begin to cover it.

"I've been so worried," the father of eight said, with his eldest son's April rent due. "I'm going to have to go and rack up more debt."

One student activist said parents had also sold cars and gold jewelry to help their children.

Many pin blame for Lebanon's worst financial crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war on political mismanagement and corruption.

As the country's foreign reserves plummet, and amid reports of mass capital flight despite currency controls since 2019, they accuse the ruling class of having plundered their savings.

A law passed last year is supposed to allow parents to access $10,000 per student enrolled abroad in 2019 at the much cheaper official exchange rate.

But parents say the banks don't care.

"They take our requests and dump them in drawers because there's no more money left to send. They stole it," said Sleiman's father.

A handful of parents or grandparents have filed lawsuits against their banks and won, the latest last month.

One of them was able last year to transfer funds to his sons in France and Spain so they could graduate.

Sleiman and fellow parents are looking into doing the same.

And the International Union of Lebanese Youth, covering students in 20 countries, has started working with volunteer lawyers towards filing dozens more cases.

But lawyer and activist Nizar Sayegh said these cases were still rare and complicated by coronavirus lockdowns and banks filing appeals.

Many families also shy away from legal action for fear the banks would then close their account, he said.

In Italy, 20-year-old Reine Kassis said she and fellow cash-strapped Lebanese flatmates were having to delay breakfast till lunch time.

"We eat toast and cheese, then study, study, study until supper," said the mechanical engineering student in Ferrara.

She says she has received a little help in Italy.

But her brother, 23, had to return from Ukraine to Lebanon to continue studying online because he could not afford the rent.

Their father Maurice Kassis, a retired officer, said he was heartbroken.

"I only had two children so I could spoil them, and educate them properly," the 54-year-old said in the eastern town of Zahle.

When he retired, he had enough savings stashed away in Lebanese pounds to cover both of them studying abroad.

But today, with the collapse of the Lebanese currency, those pounds would fetch just an eighth of their old value in dollars.

After he has paid off his home loan with his pension each month, he only has the equivalent of $50 left for the whole family.

"How do you educate your children with that?" he asked.

"I'm telling them to find themselves a future abroad."

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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad

People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad

People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)

Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks.

Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment.

That was 2012, and the entire security apparatus of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests against his rule.

With Assad’s fall a month ago, the machinery of death that he ran is starting to come out into the open.

It was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities into which tens of thousands disappeared over more than a decade. Torture, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant, according to rights groups and former prisoners.

A blanket of fear kept Syrians silent about their experiences or lost loved ones. But now, everyone is talking. After the insurgents who swept Assad out of power on Dec. 8 opened prisons and detention facilities, crowds swarmed in, searching for answers, bodies of loved ones, and ways to heal.

The Associated Press visited seven of these facilities in Damascus and spoke to nine former detainees. Some details of the accounts by those who spoke to the AP could not be independently confirmed, but they matched past reports by former detainees to human rights groups.

Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra — now 33 — came to visit Branch 215, a detention facility run by military intelligence in Damascus where he was held for two months.

There, he said, he was kept in a windowless underground cell, 4-by-4-meters (yards) and crammed with 100 other inmates. When ventilators were cut off -- either intentionally or because of a power failure -- some suffocated. Men went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his body next to the cell’s toilet until jailers collected corpses, Zahra said.

“Death was the least bad thing,” he said. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.”

A member of the security forces for the new interim Syrian government stands next to prison cells at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility operated by the General Intelligence Agency during Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 14, 2024. (AP)

Assad’s system of repression grew as civil war raged

After he and his father were released, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Within a few months, security agents returned and dragged off 13 of his male relatives, including a younger brother and, again, his father.

All were killed. Zahra later recognized their bodies among photos leaked by a defector showing thousands killed in detention. Their bodies were never recovered.

Rights groups estimate at least 150,000 people went missing since anti-government protests began in 2011, most vanishing into detention facilities. Many were killed, either in mass executions or from torture and prison conditions. The exact number remains unknown.

Even before the uprising, Assad had ruled with an iron fist. But as protests turned into a civil war that would last 14 years, Assad expanded his system of repression. New detention facilities run by military, security and intelligence agencies sprung up in security compounds, military airports and under buildings.

At Branch 215, Zahra hoped to find some sign of his lost relatives. But there was nothing. At home, his aunt, Rajaa Zahra, looked at the leaked pictures of her killed children for the first time – something she had long refused to do. She lost four of her six sons in Assad’s crackdowns. Her brother, she said, lost two of his three sons.

“They were hoping to finish off all the young men of the country.”

A site believed to be a mass grave for detainees killed under Bashar al-Assad's rule is visible in Najha, south of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)

Syrians were tortured with ‘the tire’ and ‘magic carpet’

The tortures had names. One was called the “magic carpet,” where a detainee was strapped to a hinged wooden plank that bends in half, folding his head to his feet, which were then beaten.

Abdul-Karim Hajeko said he endured this five times. His torturers stomped on his back during interrogations at the Criminal Security branch, and his vertebrae are still broken.

“My screams would go to heaven. Once a doctor came down from the fourth floor (to the ground floor) because of my screams,” he said.

He was also put in “the tire.” His legs were bent inside a car tire as interrogators beat his back and feet. Afterward, they ordered him to kiss the tire and thank it for teaching him “how to behave.”

Many prisoners said the tire was inflicted for rule violations -- like making noise, raising one’s head in front of guards, or praying – or for no reason at all.

Saleh Turki Yahia said a cellmate died nearly every day during the seven months in 2012 he was held at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility run by the General Intelligence Agency. He said he was given electric shocks, hanged from his wrists, beaten on his feet. He lost half his body weight and nearly tore his own skin scratching from scabies.

“They broke us,” he said, breaking into tears as he visited the Palestine Branch. “A whole generation is destroyed.”

Documents are scattered around Branch 215, a detention facility run by Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)

The mounting evidence will be used in trials

Now comes the monumental task of accounting for the missing and compiling evidence that could one day be used to prosecute Assad’s officials, whether by Syrian or international courts.

Hundreds of thousands of documents remain scattered throughout detention facilities. Some seen by the AP included transcripts of phone conversations; intelligence files on activists; and a list of hundreds of prisoners killed in detention. At least 15 mass graves have been identified around Damascus and elsewhere around the country.

A UN body known as the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism has offered to help the new interim administration in collecting, organizing and analyzing all the material. Since 2011, it has been compiling evidence and supporting investigations in over 200 criminal cases against figures in Assad’s government.

Many want answers now.

Officials cannot just declare that the missing are presumed dead, said Wafaa Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, whose father was detained and killed 12 years ago.

“No one gets to tell the families what happened without evidence, without search, without work.”